Half Holocaust chronicle, half psychoanalytical pimping, this book straddles a strange place stuck between delving into the human condition and feeling good like some sort of literary infomercial. Fortunately, what it’s selling isn’t vulgar and is ultimately as ethereal and undefinable as the meaning of life.

While the book trips over itself in a few places, it is a book to be read by everyone. Not for the quality of its prose, but for its message, it’s insistence on the imperative that on the face of everything is the fact that we are in this together and that that understanding is our greatest chance for a life, a history worth creating.

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” – Viktor E. Frankel